A chronicle of Eileen and Chip's round-the-world jaunt.

New Zealand

August 09, 2009

If you look to the right, you can see I've added a bunch of new photo albums in the past week, taking us from New Zealand and Australia right through our safari experiences. Not a lot of captioning to explain what you're looking at; hoping to get to that at some point, but if you have any questions about any of them just fire off an email or comment here.

May 25, 2009

In our years living in California we've done a few long driving trips around the West, including a grand loop from San Francisco to San Diego to Phoenix and back to SF via the Grand Canyon and Zion National Parks, as well as ten days meandering up to Seattle and back, so the prospect of doing something similar here didn't faze us, especially as a change of pace from our uninterrupted month-long stay in Buenos Aires. And it's worked out great - we've gotten to see huge chunks of both islands, even without trying to see and do everything it's possible to do here.

To prove how far we've gone, the photo above is from Cape Reinga, at the very northern tip of the North Island and the northernmost point of the country. We visited there the other day after spending the night at, of all places, a golf resort on the Karikari Peninsula just to the south (owned by a guy repeatedly referred to as "reclusive American billionaire Paul Kelly" who turns out to be a Wharton grad and Penn trustee). This was the view from the heavily discounted villa where we spent the night:

Much like our drives around the American West, it's been an endless series of picture postcard views. Every hillcrest you cross is another spectacular sweeping view across the landscape to distant mountains or the distant sea or those amazing green hills dotted with livestock which you saw in all the Shire scenes of the Lord of the Riongs movies. "Scenic vista" long ago became our joking shorthand for "holy shit, that's one impressive view," one we would repeat to each other several times an hour on our drives up and down the equally spectacular Pacific Coast Highway. Well, we've reached overload on the use of the phrase in the past couple of weeks. Just the lighthouse and the seascape around Cape Reinga alone qualified:

Look at the wave action here - this is where the currents from the Tasman Sea to the West (coming from the left of the frame) cross the currents from the Pacific at nearly a perfect right angle (coming from the right) just below the lighthouse, crashing into each other with enormous power before devolving into rips and whirlpools that look like they could suck a supertanker under:

Just a couple kilometers south of here is the northern end of the west shore's 90 Mile Beach, and the massive sand dunes at Te Paki:

You can't see her, but Eileen's sitting in one of cars down there while I'm slogging up the dunes:

And a couple hours south of here were the towns of Opononi & Omapere, where we spent the following night. So these postcards were all in one day's drive. And I could have taken many more pictures than I did along the way:

May 23, 2009

Deconstructing the Maori-Pakeha relationship in New Zealand (Pakeha is the Maori word for foreigners) is a difficult one if you're a tourist, since you know you're never quite getting a representative experience in your brief exposure to it, and ours has definitely been brief. But one thing that emerges when you spend any time here, especially if you read a bit of the history, is that the Maori, compared to some of their peers among the conquered indigenous peoples of the New World, have managed to achieve a more prominent and honored standing in their country today than, say, the Aborigines in Australia, the Incas in Peru, or most of the American Indian tribes in the States. And they haven't relied on casinos to claim that standing, either.

Part of why they've done that is because their first encounter with Europeans was that much more recent than anywhere else (although more or less contemporaneous with that of the Plains Indians in the U.S.) Part of it is that culturally they were much more organized as a society, at least compared to those Plains tribes, or the Australian Aborigines. Also, unlike the even-more organized Incas or Aztecs in Central and South America, it wasn't only timing (that couple of centuries difference before contact made for some slightly less aggressive European attitudes) but the fact that they had an advantage in being at least visibly resource poor, with no obvious surplus of a precious commodity like gold or silver for the Europeans who first showed up here to lust after. There wasn't a Sutter's Mill in Hawkes Bay, for example. The things they did offer, like flax, they were able to control and trade themselves in the early years. So the Maori didn't have to suffer through a conquistador period, at least on the scale of the Americas, although there was plenty of suffering for them from newly introduced diseases, as well as from the introduction of gunpowder into a society where revenge war was already prominent.

May 22, 2009

The Maori name for the North Island is Te Ika a Maui - "The Fish of Maui." In Maori mythology, Maui is a demigod responsible for all kinds of creative acts, and he plays a similar role in Hawaiian myths. Like that other island named by their Polynesian cousins in Hawai'i, this one has been producing rainbows like mad for us in recent days. We saw this one during an afternoon cruise yesterday through the Bay of Islands. A little cooler than the Hawaiian Maui, though!

May 20, 2009

Something you'll see few other places in the world: domesticated deer, in this case red deer originally imported from Europe for hunting (and like those stoats, now an incredible nuisance in the wild here). They're everywhere, especially on the South Island - not quite as widespread as sheep or cattle, but constantly visible as you drive the rural regions. Thus, venison is on many a restaurant menu. Amazingly, the industry has only existed since the 70s, and they claim it's the first successful domestication of a previously wild animal in 5000 years.

We've long been a fan of New Zealand wine, especially the Sauvignon Blanc - En Zed whites are mostly all we get in the States - but we've added some new favorites since we've arrived here, with our Marlborough trip helping to cement them. Besides the "Savvy," as the Kiwis call it, in the past we've also enjoyed drinking the unoaked Chardonnays that many wineries here produce (Kim Crawford is a major producer exporting to the U.S. who does one, if you're interested in seeing what we mean), since neither of us can stand the heavy oaking of California Chards. But our newest revelation is oaked Savvy, something that we haven't seen much at all in the States but which we tasted and enjoyed several times in Marlborough. A lot of the wineries that produce them don't export to the U.S., or at least not in any quantity, unfortunately, but one favorite you might look for is from Seresin Estate, whose logo you can see in the picture above.

Another revelation: NZ Rieslings. Neither of us had much of a Riesling palate before coming here - it's not produced that much in California, and we simply haven't tasted enough from Alsace or Germany to appreciate the grape - but we've become big fans of the dry versions produced in this country since we started tasting more. Tonight at dinner, for example, we had one from Te Whare Ra that we've enjoyed before and which was once again excellent.

Finally, we can say we've actually drunk and enjoyed Pinot Noir. I've had a few good Pinots from the States, but despite the incredible marketing effort of Paul Giamatti in Sideways, when sampling the best from Oregon and California there have been many more misses than hits, and Eileen's opinion of the U.S. Pinots is even lower than mine. Not true here. Maybe it's the climate, maybe it's that they're doing it in more of the French Burgundy style, but the Pinot Noirs here definitely have appealed to us more.

May 18, 2009

It's as strikingly beautiful as other hills & seaside cities like San Francisco or Seattle or Sydney, if just a bit smaller than all of them. The shot above was taken at the Botanic Gardens, looking over downtown, which you reach via - yes - a cable car from the central business district below.

On the way up on the cable car, and when we reached the top, we ran into several people wearing these bibs:

The bibs said City Safari, and everyone wearing them was exceedingly serious about whatever it was they were doing, which was clearly some sort of team competition:

Turns out it was part of a regular series of orienteering competitions that are popular here. There were young people, old people, and family groups doing it. There was something somehow sweetly innocent and truly foreign (as in unfamilar) about the whole thing, including the seriousness of the competitors - I'm not sure I could imagine seeing anything like this in an American city.

Posting has remained light for the perverse reason that we've finally had decent, unrestricted and best of all extremely fast Net access for the first time in several days. That's allowed me to catch up on a backlog of photo backups, as well as the addition of some new photo albums on this site. You can see several of the latter on the right which I've added in the past day or two. Tomorrow we're grabbing a rental car so we can see some of the countryside of the North Island via a drive north to Auckland; I may try to catch up on what we've been doing the past couple weeks with some quick hit posts.

May 15, 2009

The near-realtime view from our window in the Kaitaki Plus Lounge, as we depart Picton aboard the InterIslander Ferry - which has free broadband wi-fi! Slow but serviceable. It's raining, but we hope it clears enough for us to get good views of the Cook Strait on the three-hour crossing.